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Pandora Advertising Discrepancy

An associate of mine spent quite a bit of money on Pandora radio ads last month. They say that Pandora's reporting said they got a few thousand clicks from their radio ads (which should become referrers on analytics) with 1.30% clickthrough. This is an absurdly high clickthrough and I am pretty sure this is wrong. I can't see his ad (for a hospital) getting such a high clickthrough, furthermore, the analytics data does not match what pandora says they got.

Anyone have similar experiences or any theories? This is what Pandora said when we asked them why their data doesn't match analytics, but this is mostly them saying that "analytics data can be wrong" in much longer words.

"A discrepancy between DFP and Google analytics is to be expected because of the standing differences in reporting methodologies. DFP data is based on ad server logs and it is generally much more accurate at reporting ad impressions than analytics data, which is based on cookies or page loads.

There are a reasons why you could be seeing these discrepancies: - Different counting methodologies (server-based counting vs counting cookies or page loads) - Not counting the same thing: a click in Dart is not the same as an impression in analytics packages - The comparison with mobile data from DFP to Google Analytics is particularly vexing because our mobile clicks happen in an app environment, and open in a native Pandora browser, so the numbers for that are routinely rather discrepant.

Also, comparing referrer URLs to DFP clicks often show a discrepancy because referrers in analytics aren't an accurate measure of clicks or landings for the following reasons: - Referrers can be disabled on most browsers. - Internet security applications can block referrer data. - Firewall and proxy servers can filter out referrers. - Users can set up referrer spoofing to prevent a site from knowing where they've been.

In a nutshell, the numbers may not match because they are not counting the same thing, DoubleClick (DFP) has a validated click counting methodology. Google Analytics package works as a "page visit" tool. "

5 Responses

I don't know the answer. However I would do a test that measures pandora traffic by several different analytics programs and throw it back to them. I would use something like: GA, weblogexpert, clicktracks, getclicky... and if these say a few hundred but pandora says a few thousand then you know something is wrong.

Did you ever get an answer from this? I too have a client who decided it was a good idea to do pandora ads with their media buyer. We had a company by mistake grab a url of ours and post it on their facebook page and run ads to their fan page which caused a large spike in traffic. And the media buyer saw this when he got in GA and said that this spike matches with pandora advertising. Which a) it reports as facebook and b)if it even did, the region the traffic came from is nowhere near the client's business.

I know this is a few months later, but I have been working with Pandora throughout 2013 and have seen wildly different numbers in Google Analytics compared with the dinky spreadsheet they provide at the end of each campaign.

I had a call with a sales rep today and picked his brain for about an hour. His response to my questioning matched the original post on this thread. In a nutshell, "visits from inside the mobile Pandora app to an external website remain in the app and therefore do not pass the cookie that would trigger a visit." He said there was no solution to this problem and that whoever figures it out would be a billionaire. Um OK.

As the conversation continued, we started to discuss Pandora's advertising role, generally speaking. He kept trying to get me to focus on the impression, not the click. He explained that it was a bit of a misnomer to be considered digital advertising because really they are more in line with traditional radio advertising. The click is added benefit and really the advertiser is paying for the branding and precise geographic and demographic targeting. Unlike traditional radio, you can pick a specific county (even zip code depending on spend), age group, musical tastes and gender and serve the ad. This level of targeting is what you pay for, not the click. And according to the rep, "tracking the success of a Pandora campaign is not necessary (or possible)."

In a nutshell, there is no way to prove that those clicks actually took place. Pandora has no plans to build a robust backend reporting system that would provide advertisers with true data on the performance of the ads.

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